Comment by Xirdus
8 hours ago
It's very likely it violates the DMCA "breaking digital lock" provisions but the responsibility is sufficiently diluted that it's impossible to charge anyone in particular.
8 hours ago
It's very likely it violates the DMCA "breaking digital lock" provisions but the responsibility is sufficiently diluted that it's impossible to charge anyone in particular.
There have been news stories where individual OpenAI users have been investigated based on their prompts. If OpenAI can point the police to specific users of their software, they can certainly point them to whichever of their own employees are involved in a crime. AI is just a tool, and the person prompting it is the one responsible for the outcome. No dilution there.
What is its one their "under development" models who escaped it's training, because it wasn't tuned properly?
That’s corporate negligence. The executives are liable unless there is evidence of malfeasance by one of the employees.
Counter argument being that this seems to indicate you can do whatever as long as you're innovating?
[dead]
Do you have to charge an individual? Can you not charge the corporate "person" that is OpenAI?
Sorry if it is a stupid question, as mentioned above I am legally naïve.
Companies can certainly be charged with crimes. Punishments can be via fines or sanctions (court appointed monitors, etc).
Individual employees can also be charged for their specific actions as part of the performance of a crime.
I, too, have no idea about legal matters.
But there have been many cases where companies (Google, Apple, Meta, etc...) got fined millions or billions of dollars for various violations like antitrust.
I assume that breaching into third-party systems should carry similar fines. Especially for systems that are for all intents and purposes shared infrastructure. Just imagine how many systems you could compromise if you got hold of RubyGems, PyPI, NPM, Debian, etc.
Let's take a hypothetical example:
Suppose you're a firework company and your fireworks blow up, burning down the entire town. Could the company be sued? What is considered reasonable safety measures?
IANAL, but I'm pretty confident there would be a lawsuit. Who gets charged might differ, depending if it is the firework factory that didn't take adequate safety precautions or a chemical supplier or someone else. If there wasn't an ability to sue that would be fucking crazy and we should all get up in arms about it. And isn't insurance supposed to be there to help mitigate the damages, regardless of fault?
Personally, given how it seems OAI's agents have been getting through either pretty obvious places (e.g. /etc/hosts) or that there wasn't close monitoring of the most obvious places (e.g. DNS, artifactory), I'd imagine it wouldn't be hard to find them negligent. Even if a single employee is to blame then are they not to blame for not monitoring the agents regardless? Unless the story is that the employee intentionally circumvented defenses (why?) then it seems it would be on OAI. But again, IANAL, I'm just someone who think if we can't sue we can sure riot until we can
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As far as I know (IANAL) it is in fact the only "person" you can charge. To the best of my knowledge, the whole point these "limited liability" legal constructions exist in the first place, is to protect individuals within a corporation for whatever they do as part of the business of a company (barring exceptions that have clearly not been part of that business and obvious individually committed crimes), typically "just following orders". If a company commits a crime, or in a worse case runs a criminal enterprise, it is the company that is legally responsible, not its employees. That is, in principle.
This can get more complicated higher up the management tree, where decisions can also be prosecuted on personal little, but that's usually a far more complicated matter. Also, if a whole group of employees willingly conspires to commit crimes, they might also be prosecuted individually for those crimes (there are limits to limited liabilities). However, that usually only works under special conditions and it would e.g. require that there's an obvious criminal enterprise aspect to it, rather than individual cases of illegal conduct.
That said, with the track record of some of these companies, actually designating some of the AI companies as a criminal enterprises may eventually happen (in due time) in some jurisdictions outside the USA. Certainly if it ever turns out that these companies have been storing and (ab)using everything they ever had access too, while blatantly lying about that just because some particular (post 9/11) US laws gives them that opportunity (and impunity) as long as the US government somehow requested them to do so (covertly; with gag order). Might legally work withing US jurisdiction, but would still be very much illegal everywhere else.
"Limited liability" refers to shareholders' financial liability being limited to their investment, and has nothing to do with civil or criminal liability of employees for their own actions, whether "following orders" or not.
The same concept that allows a corporation to sue and be sued allows it to be charged with crimes
Can you show intent? There is no negligent hacking statute, and HN of all places I would expect people to be sensitive to the implications of creating one.
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It doesn't need to be twisted to violate the DMCA anticircumvention clause because it is already just plain old hacking.
how convenient
Sounds like we need discovery to determine who to charge.
How is the responsibility diluted? Charge the CEO…
Great, you’re the attorney at the CEO’s trial. To get a conviction, you’re going to have to show that he willfully committed this specific crime. There are no negligent or stochastic hacking laws, you have to show this specific crime was at his direction.
Do you think there is evidence of this?
> There are no negligent or stochastic hacking laws
I'm sure that Andrew Auernheimer would be pleased to hear that. [0] For accessing a publicly accessible endpoint, that was completely undefended and didn't actually require "hacking", he was convicted of "exceeding authorised access".
You _don't_ have to show intent under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, for the first count.
> knowingly accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access [1]
"Knowingly", not "intentionally", as in the other counts.
You only have to show that:
a) They trained a system to access without authorization (hacking)
b) The system that was trained exceeded authorized access
As responsibility falls to the operator with automated systems, the company becomes liable.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/21/ipad-hack-statement-of-res...
[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/cioprod/documents/Co...
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That is not how it works, at least in a civilized country. The charges are not about agents, it is about operational responsibility and negligence in the company itself.
CEO is responsible for letting this to happen, not enforcing enough supervision, if not intentionally, then being grossly negligent. More severe if encouraging and letting this kind of agent research and operations happen at scale, while knowing that it can damage other systems and businesses.
So we make a law that the CEO is responsible for actions of any agent created or operated by anyone in their company. CEOs will get serious about AI security real quick. Honestly we need to do something. There needs to be a single wringable neck.
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It would seem to me that the difference between the corporate world and organized crime is that a corporation can get away with, "the responsibility is too diffuse" but the mafia at least has to go to the trouble of finding a fall guy.
Honestly yeah I bet there is and I hope to someday read about it if the government ever gets off its ass. Someone set up the “experiment”…
> the responsibility is sufficiently diluted that it's impossible to charge anyone in particular.
Was not that the goal when companies started using AI for their customer support? Be able to say anything without legal repercussions...
But then this happened: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb...
And support chatbot got a reality cold shower.
The law will find a way to charge people in particular. Sadly will start with the less powerful in the chain before it actually acts on the people that can actually change things.
A copyright law seems an odd place to start. This is computer misuse.
The DMCA is a bit overly broad to be considered just a copyright law. For example, just breaking encryption on a DVD is technically illegal regardless of whether you then go on to do something otherwise illegal (make and sell bootlegs) or perfectly legal (make a space-shifted backup copy on your hard drive).
IIRC this was an intentional handout to media companies who were angry that ripping CDs is perfectly legal. They had to find a way to make doing the same with DVDs illegal.
Those provisions are specifically for the breaking or circumvention of technical measures designed to prevent copyright infringement.
I don't see a parallel here.
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Issuing subpeonas, raiding offices, and dragging key employees into interrogation rooms as you would find in any normal criminal investigation would be more than enough to ensure "AI safety" without any new regulations, acts of congress, Bernie Sanders campaign speeches, or even charges filed.